At first, the guy in the next bunk inside Orleans Parish prison seemed to be joking, Donald Pugh told police in a taped interview last year.

But then, Abdulrahman Zeitoun's alleged plan -- to put a hit on his ex-wife and then take off with his daughters back to his native Syria -- got specific.

Zeitoun -- the protagonist in author Dave Eggers' best-selling "Zeitoun," a nonfiction account of love and perseverance in the face of post-Hurricane Katrina injustice -- asked Pugh to do the job for $20,000, Pugh told police.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun

Zeitoun told Pugh to pretend he was a prospective tenant at one of the former couple's vacant rentals on the West Bank. Zeitoun jotted down his wife's number, stuck it in an envelope and licked it, Pugh said.

"He said, 'Call Kate, tell her you're interested in seeing this apartment,'" Pugh said. "He said, 'Show up about 15 minutes later'" than the scheduled time. "He said if she drives up there and his daughters are in the car, don't do anything."

If she drove up with her boyfriend or her son, Zeitoun told him, "Shoot them off," said Pugh, 42.

The cover of Dave Eggers' nonfiction book 'Zeitoun,' set amid post-Katrina New Orleans.

Zeitoun also told Pugh to buy a "throwaway phone" to take pictures of the bodies, NOPD Detective Megan Hoxsey of the domestic violence unit testified.

"He was telling me...how he went through a divorce and how his wife took all the property and how he can't see his children," Pugh said in the taped statement. "He doesn't care about anything else. If he has his wife killed, he can get his daughters back and go back to his country of Syria. So he asks me, 'Can you do this?'"

Pugh's statement, along with testimony from Kathy Zeitoun over what she described as a violent escalation in her ex-husband's periodic abuse toward her, emerged during a court hearing Monday.

Orleans Parish prosecutors were seeking to include Abdulrahman Zeitoun's alleged past acts when the post-Katrina folk hero goes to trial on charges that he tried to kill his wife on the street, then ordered a hit on her from behind bars.

Zeitoun was indicted in November on counts of attempted first-degree murder and solicitation of first-degree murder. He also faces a new charge, accused of violating a protective order by contacting Kathy Zeitoun from jail, on Jan. 15.

Just how he allegedly did it -- by phone call, letter or some other means -- remained unclear on Monday. Criminal District Court Judge Frank Marullo has gagged the lawyers in the case, and court records do not describe the interaction.

But that charge -- to which Zeitoun pleaded not guilty on Monday -- appears to be the least of his problems, although it could serve to stiffen any other sentence Zeitoun might receive if he's found guilty.

Marullo set a June 7 date for a separate judge trial on the newest charge. He set a July 1 trial date on the attempted murder and solicitation counts.

Eggers' award-winning book chronicled the couple's courtship, their loving, sometimes playful relationship, the month Abdulrahman Zeitoun spent in jail on bogus looting charges after Katrina and the tight bond between the two that saw him through it.

But in her testimony on Monday, Kathy Zeitoun -- friends call her Kate -- told a much darker tale.

She described Zeitoun hitting her for years before and after the storm -- though nothing like the beatings she reported to police both in March 2011 and last July.

"He's hit me before, but he never beat me like that before," she said of the March 2011 incident. That's when Zeitoun -- which is what she calls him -- punched her to the ground, sat on her and kept punching her, she testified.

"He said, 'I've had enough of this,' and raised his hand. I said, 'I swear I'll call the police if you touch me.' He said, 'You'll be dead before you can pull out the phone,'" she testified as Zeitoun watched in silence.

The beat-down, she said, came in front of their children.

"I thought maybe it was a freak incident," she added.

Zeitoun was charged with domestic abuse battery, but wound up pleading guilty to a lesser charge, negligent injuring, court records show. He received a six-month suspended sentence with two years of probation and was ordered to take anger management classes.

"There were many incidences before that. They just weren't as bad," Kathy Zeitoun testified.

In 2002, at a house they owned on Claiborne Avenue, her then-husband "punched me in my face," she testified.

She also pointed to an incident just a few months after Katrina, when she says she went outside about 5 a.m. to tend to some animals left stray after the storm.

Zeitoun locked her out of the house and stood at the kitchen sink while she pleaded for him to let her back in, she testified. Then he threw hot tea in her face, she said.

There were more threats last year, until, in July, Zeitoun allegedly boxed her in while she sat in her parked car on Prytania Street near Jackson Avenue in the Garden District, then started whaling on her car with a tire iron.

When he cracked it, she got out and tried to run off, but he chased her down and beat her "so many times" with the tire iron, and choked her, she said. On the witness stand, Kathy Zeitoun mimicked how she said her ex-husband grabbed her around the neck, and how she struggled to breathe and thought she would pass out.

She said she later was diagnosed with "four ribs popped out of place," a "misaligned throat," and a bad disk in her back. Originally, police reported lacerations to her face, arms and knees. She declined emergency medical care at the scene.

She originally told police she thought he threw the tire iron at her, and prosecutors acknowledged that witnesses gave differing accounts of whether, or how, he used the tire iron.

A witness with pepper spray helped pull Zeitoun away.

Zeitoun sat in an orange jail jumpsuit, a T-shirt and sneakers, speaking in hushed tones to his lawyers, J.C. Lawrence and A.J. Ibert, but largely remaining silent. His lawyers figure to argue that whatever Zeitoun may have done, it didn't amount to an attempt on his ex-wife's life.

Marullo agreed to allow the jury to hear about the alleged 2002 face-punching incident, which Kathy Zeitoun never reported to police.

He also agreed to let in the March 2011 alleged beating after which she secured the restraining order against Zeitoun; along with an incident in June 2012 in which she says Zeitoun charged at her but didn't hit her.

Marullo said he had hoped prosecutors would present Pugh's full criminal record, which appears to include an old armed robbery count.

When he made his statement, on Aug. 7, Pugh had finished a jail stint in Orleans Parish while facing municipal charges of criminal damage to property and simple assault, police said. He had been transferred to Jefferson Parish to answer to a charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. According to online court records, the charge against Pugh was dismissed two weeks later.

Zeitoun is being held on $2 million bail under the indictment, court records show. Federal immigration officials also have placed a hold on him.

Zeitoun is not a U.S. citizen, and if he's convicted of attempted murder, he could face deportation on the "moral turpitude" clause in federal immigration law.